The holiday season crushes us with products. Mountains of stuff piled high in store aisles, in shopping carts, under trees. Endless boxes, wrapping paper, and noise, all culminating in returned toys and crowded landfills.
December is truly the height of overconsumption and overproduction in the imperial core. Every year, we buy gifts that corporations tell us will bring us joy and in the process burn fossil fuels at ever higher rates. The holiday season lays bare our current societal self-destruction.
Over the last 50 years, the global economy has ballooned in size, and with it has come the rapid tick upwards of warmer temperatures. Economic growth, capital accumulation, and rising emissions seem to be in lockstep. Which is why we need to envision a different path forward.
One where we dramatically reduce production to avoid the worst of climate change. A vision that has coalesced in recent years under the banner of degrowth. But there are so many different meanings to that charged term, and many critiques that champions of degrowth must tackle.
So, today we sift through the flourishing debates and struggles of degrowth in order to understand how we must not only dismantle the growth paradigm, but why we must connect degrowth to broader anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, and anticapitalist struggles. This video is made possible by my amazing viewers who support me on Patreon. Over the last two years, my revenue from ads and patreon has dropped dramatically.
So much so, that if this trend continues, making videos like these will become less and less financially viable. So I have a quick ask as the year draws to a close. Our Changing Climate will always be free for everyone regardless of how much I make, but OCC is a one-person operation and it would be nice to earn enough to pay for rent and my health insurance, which seems to get larger every year.
So, if you’ve been a long time viewer, or just stumbled across the channel, thank you for watching, and please consider supporting Our Changing Climate on patreon with the link in the description. Literally just one dollar a month from a small portion of my audience would be huge for the channel and to be honest, me. Neverending Growth: Since the marriage of coal and capitalist factory production during the industrial revolution, the global economy has been on a perilous ascent of growth.
World production and consumption has skyrocketed as companies produce evermore under the churning cycle of capitalist accumulation. Because growth–the growth of the economy, the growth of our impact on the earth–is ultimately the physical manifestation of capital accumulation. As the authors of The Future is Degrowth note “capitalism appears as growth– and this materialization is not only social, but also biophysical or material.
” So, when we hear Biden celebrate economic growth: “the United States had the fastest economic growth in nearly four decades,” What he’s really saying is that capital accumulation, or capitalists investing money into the production of commodities to sell for even more money in an endless cycle of overproduction and money hoarding, continues to expand unimpeded. Growth is thus an indicator of capital accumulation. But it has also become an ideology.
Biden is celebrating economic growth because, under capitalism, if an economy doesn’t grow, it dies. Put another way: the process of money turning into commodities turning into more money can never stop or the economy crashes. We’ve seen this many times throughout history– most recently in 2008 and during the pandemic.
When the process capital accumulation is interrupted, the world suffers. As degrowth scholar Jason Hickel notes, “If it does not grow, it collapses into crises. ” As a result, growth has become the core goal of most every corporation and government across the 20th and 21st century.
Economic growth under capitalism has become synonymous with progress. While living conditions dif certainly improve for some as economic growth churned onward during the 20th century and into the 21st, the connection between economic growth and so-called “progress” is more tenuous than many champion it to be. Often progress comes not from the expansion of capital, but from the struggles from workers and oppressed communities against the elite.
It was mass struggle that gained work hour limits, minimum wages, and just recently it was a historic strike that won writers a generous contract in Hollywood. And yet, growth is now the primary goal of the global economy. This valorization of growth, undergirded by capital accumulation and profit hunting, is driving a reckless amount of material production.
According to a 2022 research paper, every single year the global economy “directly waste[s] or mismanage[s] around 78% of the total water withdrawn, 49% of the food produced, 31% of the energy produced, 85% of ores and 26% of non-metallic minerals extracted. ” Even with this massive waste, there is still excess production that corporations dump onto consumers regardless of whether it is needed or not. As workers under capitalism, we are alienated from any real meaning or value in our lives.
Our jobs aren’t fulfilling, we’re separated from the natural world, and we’re siloed in single family homes, removed from our communities. All the while, corporations bombard us with messages that the solution to this disconnection is consumption. [Play ads].
In short, alienation drives us not to consume for use and subsistence, but instead to shop for the potential promise of a desirable future that under capitalism, will never arrive. By inciting this insatiable appetite for consumption, capitalists can assure there will be a market for their incessant production. Production which fuels a spiral of expansion leading to massive emissions output.
Economic growth and emissions have, historically, been tightly correlated. This is because fossil fuels are a foundational part of the cycle of capital accumulation as I talked about in my previous two videos. As a result of the rapid economic expansion in the last 50 years, Alejandro Pedregal and Juan Bordera note that “it is estimated that we have already reached 90 percent of the emissions needed to reach [1.
5C]; in a decade, we will have exceeded the limit. ” And most of this accumulation and growth has been driven by the imperial core. The U.
S. and Europe alone are responsible for 49% of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions, while China and India represent just 15%. As writer Ian Angus points out, “if the poorest 3 billion people on the planet somehow disappeared tomorrow, there would be virtually no reduction in ongoing environmental destruction.
” In short, the growth of corporations and capitalists in the imperial core that Biden is so excited about has come at the expense of the imperial periphery. Indeed from 1990 to 2015, the imperial core siphoned $242 trillion worth of land, labor, energy, and resources from the imperial periphery. That’s roughly a quarter of the periphery’s total GDP.
In short, to fuel their economic expansion, imperialist corporations and countries are plundering the landscapes and people of the periphery. We’ve seen this in the looting of Iraqi oil fields, and now in the gruesome conditions of cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There multinational companies extract and plunder precious metals for smartphones and electric cars to fuel capitalist accumulation of the imperial core.
This is what growth really means under capitalism. Rampant emissions, imperial plunder, and dispossession of the many while the few benefit and prosper. But there are many who refute these claims, who claim that we can grow the economy and dramatically drawdown our emissions.
They champion the idea of green growth. An enticing dream, but as we will soon see, an unattainable one. The Trap of Green Growth: In 2017, Barack Obama released a paper in the journal, Science, with a simple thesis: the U.
S. can grow the economy and cut emissions at the same time. This green growth or “decoupling” strategy has been the primary approach for capitalist forces.
From the Paris Agreement to some models of the IPCC, unproven technologies like carbon capture and storage alongside combined with a massive renewable build out are held up as evidence that we don’t have to dramatically downscale our resource use to take climate action. The idea being that instead of radical transformation or struggle against fossil capital to address climate change, we can just replace fossil fuelswith renewables or electric cars with gas powered ones and so on. We can somehow continue with business as usual, but just make everything electric.
Unfortunately, the promise of green growth has fallen flat on its face. It is not a viable strategy considering the speed at which we need to reduce emissions. Indeed, there is no indication that on a global scale green growth has moved the needle.
An exhaustive 2020 synthesis of 835 peer-reviewed papers on decoupling, found that while there are some rare examples of countries decoupling of emissions from economic growth, “large rapid absolute reductions of resource use and GHG emissions cannot be achieved through observed decoupling rates. ” In part, this is due to the rebound effect, or what’s called the Jevons paradox. As we increase the efficiency of energy or material use, that efficiency often leads to more energy use not less.
We’re seeing this play out with renewables. Even though the percentage of renewables installed has grown globally, the total amount of fossil fuels produced and consumed has also grown. This is because our economy constantly thirsts for more energy to sate its ever expanding production.
Looking outside energy consumption and emissions, the materials and resources needed to sustain a fully electrified economy today, not to mention one that continues to balloon, would mean extensive exploitation and plunder of the imperial periphery. Essentially, the bigger the economy gets, the deeper the hole we have to dig ourselves out of. As degrowth researcher Timothée Parrique explains, [“if you decarbonize the economy but then you just re-materialize by just you know using a lot of minerals to to build a constantly increasing renewable infrastructure you've just shifted the problem elsewhere.
”] And, if some form of a Green New Deal passes in the United States without an anti-imperialist framework, countries in the periphery like the Democratic Republic of Congo will feel the brunt of a new green imperialism hunting for precious minerals and resources. The accumulation of capital and the growth it manifests, is incompatible with a zero-carbon, just world. As younger generations look ahead to the future, growth doesn’t represent progress, but instead it means a future of climate chaos.
This must change. Degrowth is essential to preventing that future. Why Degrowth: As we blow past carbon budgets and global temperature check points, the promises that capitalism has doled out over the last 40 years feel superficial.
We need real, rapid and transformative action to address climate change, and so far capitalist solutions based on growth and continued capital accumulation have yet to move the needle. Which is why we need degrowth. But what exactly is degrowth?
At every turn it seems to have a different definition. For Jason Hickel it’s [“a kind of planned and democratic reduction of less necessary forms of production in rich countries to bring economies back into balance with the living world in a safe just and equitable way”], for the Research & Degrowth network it’s “an equitable downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions at the local and global level, in the short and long term” and for the authors of The Future is Degrowth it’s a movement in constant motion that, “in a democratic process of transformation enables global ecological justice. ” Degrowth, then, is really an umbrella term for so many different types of ideas and solutions for pulling the emergency brake on reckless economic and emissions growth.
But for the sake of the video, we’ll treat degrowth as the struggle for a good, ecological, life for all through the planned, democratic, and drastic reduction of destructive production in the imperial core, the redistribution of wealth and knowledge globally, and the eradication of the capitalist mode of production. The vision of degrowth isn’t a utopian pipe dream, it’s called for in climate models and the science of climate change. Because, the reality is that we need to act decisively on fossil fuel emissions right now if we are to have any chance of avoiding the worst of climate chaos.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects the capitalist tinkering of the Paris Agreement will still push us down a path of roughly 3. 2 degrees celsius of temperature rise by the end of the century. When every decimal of warming increases risks of extreme floods, species extinction, wildfires, drought, and sea level rise, this path is unacceptable.
Right now we’re running out of carbon budget, which is a calculation of the how much carbon we can burn and still remain below 1. 5 or 2C of warming. Drstic cuts are not only crucial, but scientifically called for.
We’re hearing calls for a form of degrowth straight from the IPCC itself: “All global modeled pathways that limit warming to 1. 5°C … involve rapid and deep and, in most cases, immediate greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors this decade” Green growth and capitalist market solutions just aren’t delivering these emissions reductions, which is why we need to actually reduce the rampant overproduction of the imperial core and multinationals. This is where degrowth comes in.
When we look across history, global fossil fuel emissions only declined in times when GDP fell. We saw exactly this during the pandemic, as the global economy paused and emissions dropped drastically for a year. But pure GDP decline is not the goal of degrowth.
It is instead the global redistribution of resources and the abolition of unnecessary and or destructive industries like fossil fuels and the military. Degrowth is necessary because of the Jevons paradox. It’s not enough just to build renewables and hope that they will replace fossil fuels.
We’ve seen that fossil fuels and capital are so intimately intertwined that this will never happen, which is why we need to actively minimize the production of emissions intensive industries. But degrowth isn’t just the planned dismantling of harmful industries. It’s also about fostering thriving communities locally and globally.
Degrowth is ultimately a divest/invest paradigm. So at the same time we’re reducing unnecessary production, we need to struggle for global climate reparations and the expansion of care work, public transportation, and the joyful sustainable lives for all. In short, degrowth is a framework that reprioritizes public goods, ways of being that heal the natural world, fosters happiness, and a good life.
All the while it seeks to dismante systems of profit and competition that drove us into this crisis in the first place. Systems that so far, have failed to dig us out of this mess. Critiques of Degrowth: On the grounds of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, artists and authors Kris De Decker & Melle Smets envision a building of the future.
A 22 floor student dormitory that’s been repurposed into a zero-emissions haven. One that’s equipped with 750 individual student rooms, communal showers, laundry floors, communal kitchens, biogas digesters that convert food scraps into energy, and wind turbines on the roof. But behind the walls of this dormitory lies something different.
There are no elevators in the building and the bottom three floors of the structure house the human power plant. For De Decker and Smets, this artistic thinkpiece is one of their many forays into the low tech and degrowth space. The human powered building envisions students spending time at the human power plant, which is essentially a gym, as a way to produce the primary power for their building.
For many who first stumble across the concept of degrowth this is often what comes to mind: hardship and toil to minimize our ecological impact. Or as one journalist from The Conversation Weekly asks, “how could we possibly reduce more without as you kind of referred to going back into caves and living next to candles. ” This fear of anything other than economic growth and capital accumulation lies at the heart of many critiques of degrowth.
While some are merely just bad faith or misunderstood readings of degrowth, other critiques are valid and need addressing. For many, degrowth can be misconstrued as austerity by another name. This is not the case.
Degrowth seeks a democratically planned contraction of production based on the needs of the masses. This is very different from an economic recession or austerity measures that carve out public necessities for the sake of freeing up the markets and enriching the capitalist class. Degrowth is not austerity.
But it may slip into dangerous directions of eco-fascism without the incorporation of racial justice, decolonial, and disability justice lenses. De Decker and Smet’s visions of a human-powered plant, while intriguing, reveal these pitfalls. Without elevators, this 22 floor building is made with only the able-bodied in mind.
In addition, a building powered primarily on the physical toil of humans, could easily slip into a form of eco-fascism, especially under a capitalist system where marginalized communities and people of color are often the ones forced to power the devices of those living quite literally above them. This scenario seems to echo the precious metal mining in the imperial periphery that powers our smartphones and electric cars in the imperial core. Or the forced labor in China, that allow the core countries to enjoy rock bottom prices.
The human-powered plant reveals the trap of lifestylism that pervades degrowth. A current that claims that transforming the way we live and consume, whether by moving out to the country or going off grid, is how we achieve a decrease in emissions. There are many degrowth communities out there doing just that, but while these might be examples of what is possible in the future, they will unfortunately not end the supremacy of capital accumulation and imperialism.
The vast majority of people don’t have the luxury to check out of the city, away from family and bills. Many are trapped under the cog of capitalist production. Narrowing in on individual lifestyle transformation, as the authors of The Future is Degrowth write, is “environmentalism of the rich,” which blames overconsumption, and not the true culprit of overproduction.
As a result those who aren’t able to minimize their impact because of their disabilities, the pressures of their work, or so many other pressures under a fossil fuel centric capitalism, are ostracized by those who have the luxury and time to build a bubble of personal degrowth within capitalism. So, Degrowth needs to attack and dismantle fossil capital– not our individual consumption habits– if it is to be successful. What does degrowth actually look like?
Tucked away in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia lies this unassuming house. Owners Sam and Helen have retrofitted their residence with solar panels, an abundant garden, a biogas digester and more. Is this degrowth?
Well, yes and also no. Sam and Helen’s house certainly point to the possibilities and solutions to building individual zero carbon systems, but for me if degrowth ends there, at lifestyleism, it will ultimately fail as a political project. Which is why as the authors of The Future is Degrowth claim, degrowth must envision a pluriverse, quoting the Zapatistas, “a world where many worlds fit.
” According to The Future is Degrowth, degrowth has five main currents, some of which are more effective in moving past and struggling against capitalism than others. The first of which is the “institutional current. ” A strain of degrowth spearheaded by green-liberal reformers.
Wielding government power and electoral politics, these degrowthers are trying to use current capitalist governments to push through regulations and fiscal deterants, like carbon taxes or heat pump subsidies. These are ultimately reforms, many of which, like window retrofit subsidies or electric stove tax rebates, tinker around the edges avoiding ground up demolition of capitalism, while others represent radical or non-reformist reforms, like income maximums, work hour reductions, or free electrified public transit, which seek to weaken capitalist power on the road to an ecosocial degrowth revolution. But there are also more individualized currents of degrowth.
What we can call the “sufficiency oriented current. ” This current emphasizes the rightsizing of individual consumption, through DIY approaches like that of Helen and Sam in the suburbs. While effective on a small, local scale, this focus on individual lifestyle transformation not only ignores the constant capitalist forces pushing us to consume as I mentioned before, but it also, as the authors of The Future is Degrowth, write, “downplay[s] the importance of necessary social and structural change.
” In short, completely cutting yourself off from fossil fuels and dramatically decreasing your resource consumption is difficult in a world where most everything around us requires or is produced through fossil fuels. And even if you are successful, fossil capital’s profits still continue to rise unimpeded. Which is why this current must be combined with the third current of degrowth, what The Future is Degrowth calls “the commoning or alternative economy current.
” With a focus on sovereignty, solidarity, and resource sharing, this current attempts to achieve collective “nowtopias” outside of our capitalist mode of production. This looks like community-support agriculture, worker owned co-ops or land sovereignty and agrarian struggles in the imperial periphery that seek the production of materials for use rather than for exchange and profit. The goal of this current is to build enough collective power outside of the dominant capitalist model, to eventually challenge it head on.
This community-centered degrowth current also ties into the fourth path of degrowth– the “feminist current. ” Feminist degrowth foregrounds the importance of care and reproductive activities as a crucial part of a zero carbon economy. It’s A current which seeks the transformation of the nuclear family into strong community networks of care.
And finally, the “post-capitalist and alter-globalization current. ” This type of degrowth argues that international emancipatory revolutions, that place the ownership of production into the hands of masses, are crucial for any degrowth angenda. This means building worker power, the destruction of capitalism and in its ashes an ecosocialist state that decreases production to focus on use and necessities rather than profit.
This looks like a worker-led revolution to obtain reduction in work hours, the shuttering of industrial behemoths like the fossil fuel industry, the redistribution of resources internationally, reparations to the periphery for the centuries of imperial plunder, and more. Ultimately degrowth looks like, as this paper describes, a 60% reduction in global energy consumption, and a 95% reduction of energy use in the imperial core countries in the U. S.
Crucially the researchers claim that is possible while also providing a decent living for all. It would be a world that has highly efficient washing, cooking, and housing facilities, rapid and expansive public transit, free healthcare and education, free internet access for all globally, fresh and hot water for all, and more. There would be abundant green spaces and communal gardens, and substantially reduced working hours.
The authors of this paper show that technically, a world that uses and produces less is possible. The barriers are not the technologies, but instead social and economic forces. Which is why we’ll most likely need some form of all of those five currents in the struggle to achieve this degrowth.
But, some of these currents are more crucial than others. Because capital accumulation will not magically end because some communities reveal that living a zero-carbon, low consumption lifestyle is possible. Ultimately, degrowth must be married to a post-capitalist economic framework.
One that places production into the hands of people. One that is democratically planned so that we aren’t creating mountains of waste or products that only mask our hollow alienation for a brief moment. Degrowth must be accompanied by ecosocialism.
As we draw near the end of the year, I have an ask. For over seven years, I’ve been making Our Changing Climate videos all by myself seeking to educate and ask questions about the root causes and solutions of the climate and environmental crisis. My videos will always be free to watch, but recently, my revenue has slipped because of a combination of demonetization and a declining number of patreon supporters.
So I’m turning to you, the wonderful people who watch my videos month in and month out. If you have the means, please consider supporting the channel on Patreon using the link in the description. My goal is to reach 750 supporters by the end of the year, and with your help, I think we can do that.
Just pledging a dollar a month is huge for the channel, and when you become a patreon supporter you’ll get early access to my videos, bonus content, and or even the occasional full-length interview with authors or scholars. But if you aren’t able to become a channel patron, please don’t worry, just by watching this video to the end, you’ve done your part. Thank you, and thank you so much to those who already support me on Patreon, you’re the reason I’m able to make videos like this.
Thanks again, and I’ll see you next month.
